WOW #3:The Wonders of Wordle

Wordle is a web tool that generates “word clouds” from text that you provide or that you import from somewhere else. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the text you provide. The bigger the word is, indicates its dominance of usage. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share online!

Who Can Use Wordle?

Anyone (& it’s free)

You can encourage your students to create word clouds as an assignment in ANY content area. You don’t even have to register for the site. Just click & create!

Why Use Wordle?

Here are some ideas:

Students can use it to monitor the frequency of word usage in their own writings.

a. How often do they use the same adjectives or nouns?

b. Are they overusing words?

Analyze news articles.

a. What is this article about?

b. What’s the gist that the author is trying to get across?

c. Check out this assignment (be sure to read the comments that readers left too)

a. Have each student generate a list of what they saw are learned on the field trip. Combine the list, copy and paste into Wordle. Yippee! you have an instant “What’s Important List” from the field trip. (side note: A wiki would be good for creating that list…

Create a Current Events Analysis.

a. Copy the RSS feed from popular news sights like Google News and use Wordle to give you the hot topics.

b. Copy the text from a news page and use the same way.

What are your students listening to? Copy and paste the lyrics of popular songs into Wordle and find out.

What is important on your school campus? Copy and paste your schools mission and vision statements into Wordle and find out.

Self Reflection. If you were to write a story about yourself, what would your Wordle say?

Current Study posters. What curriculum topic is important in your class this week? Create a Wordle that visualizes that.

There are as many ways to use Wordle as there are clouds in the sky (pardon the pun). If you were to Wordle this email post what would be the biggest word?

Reply to this post to let everyone know how you used or plan to use Wordle. Blog post replies are a great way to share your ideas with your Personal Learning Network & Professional Learning Community!

Popular

I pride myself on my lectures. I was voted “Best Lecturer” in the 2013 Sherwood High School yearbook. I’ve been told that my lectures are easily understood, engaging, interactive with plenty of student discourse–and I’m pretty darn funny! My students consistently scored very well on the Advanced Placement U.S. history exam. So what’s the issue? Lecturing works.

Kari Byron (Mythbusters, Head Rush) is incredibly passionate about science, and she’s joining an increasingly large number of educators, parents, and celebrities in urging young girls to brush aside “nerdy” stereotypes that have plagued them for years — and get them to explore STEM opportunities and careers. We caught up with Kari at SXSWedu this

How can we make the 63,000 questions we ask in a year better? We ask our students a lot of questions. Questioning is the most widely used teaching strategy behind the classic lecture. (See my previous blog post about the debate over lecturing in social studies.) Research tells us we ask 300-400 questions a day, and as many